


Shelby, Limited

by wheredwellthe_brave_atheart



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Ada is also just as lost and alone as every Shelby, Ada is damn smart, Co-Dependency, Consequences of war, Even I don’t know if they fuck, F/M, Gen, Listen everything is sad and horrible because of war and chaos and violence and love, Power Play, Unhealthy Relationships, Violence, ridiculous amounts of smoking and drinking, the 1920s were full of hedonistic nihilists and boy do the Shelbys exemplify that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-17
Updated: 2018-11-17
Packaged: 2019-08-24 17:47:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16644893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wheredwellthe_brave_atheart/pseuds/wheredwellthe_brave_atheart
Summary: Tommy Shelby is a victor. A consummate survivor. He will go on.Ada will keep watch.





	Shelby, Limited

**Author's Note:**

> The Shelbys are eternally fascinating and I’ve worked with only a small portion of their family and their story and their possibilities here - maybe more to come, but for now here is how I see Ada, seeing Tommy.
> 
> Some additional warnings: could be read as sibling incest, references to canon-typical violence, period-typical sexism, alcoholism, PTSD, and all the other hard stuff that comes in an intimate relationship with Tommy Shelby.
> 
> “Darkness darkness, hide my yearning,  
> For the things that cannot be.  
> Keep my mind from constant turning,  
> Towards the things I cannot see now.”  
> -The Youngbloods

Ada grows up watching.

She’s undoubtably in the thick of things, but somehow always on the edges, too. She doesn’t think anything of it when she’s young. When she’s young she can scrap and scream and steal as good as Arthur or Tom, and they’re indistinguishable as three vagabonds covered in soot, their faces cracked by identical wicked, youthful grins. Freddie is there too, in those rainy childhood days, and the slap of his shoes on the pavement is almost as familiar to her as her brothers’.

When she’s young she’s another one of the Shelby brats, and she doesn’t think much of how she stands apart from her brothers. It’s only later on that the world doesn’t give her a choice of whether or not to notice.

It’s why she and Aunt Pol are so well-suited. They’re both subtle. No need to shout about where you’re at, so long as the right people understand what’s what.

When baby Finn is born she is no longer the youngest but her place as daughter, sister, niece, girl is unchanged. That becomes solidified, if anything. Another good Shelby boy is added and Ada remains as ever an oddity of femininity.

So Ada is left in the liminal spaces of the Shelby clan. Always somewhere in the hazy middle of that intangible sliding scale of hierarchy, the one which changes forever after the boys come home from France. When Arthur falls, and John drifts sideways, and Tommy climbs irrevocably to the top.

And that’s it, really. Because when it comes down to it, everything is about the war, because of the war. Everything. Every part of who they are was forever changed by the dirt and tunnels and blood and mud of France.

And from then on - after the King sent them all home, all her bruised and battered brothers shuttled back to the filthy streets of Small Heath, with French dirt under their nails and German gas in their chests and Allied victory in their arteries - Ada watches as Tommy courts death, and pretends he’d like nothing better than to lose. But she can tell it’s false - he fights back too hard. He gives himself away. He’s bored, he’s desperate, and he’s aching to prove he’s still alive.

(Ada sighs as she watches Tommy flick through more lists of registered voters, the cigarette dangling from his lip dissolving steadily and precariously into ash.

What’s all this bloody politicking for, Tom? Really, she presses.

Tommy barely looks up. Trying to avoid more bloodshed, I suppose, he mumbles.

She shakes her head. As if, she dismisses him. You’re calmest with a gun aimed at your pretty face, you great bastard.

He glances up at her slyly. You worry about my pretty face, do you Ada?

She scoffs. It’s the face of the company, isn’t it? she asks. And I’ve got quite an investment in Shelby Company, Ltd., she sniffs.

Of course, he shrugs.)

Tommy is forever trying to balance on the Devil’s tightrope, and sometimes he wants an added challenge so he tries to trip himself up.

Special trials come from others, of course. Tommy is drawn to people who remind him of himself - he’s narcissistic, yes, and unquestionably self-obsessed, but it’s more than that, Ada knows. It’s still about pushing himself, honing himself, continually sharpening Tommy Shelby on the whetstone of competition. By competing with those he sees himself in, he is competing with himself. And he is his own greatest opponent.

(Tommy rifles through papers and swigs from his glass without pausing to take his eyes from the rows of signatures written in expensive, flowing ink. Things are happening, Ada, he declares, and he gesticulates with his whiskey. Things are moving quick.

Ada sits across from her brother in his dark office and imagines him wounded, helpless. Something should happen, something to stymie the efforts he makes towards his own destruction, something to halt his progress in the reckless endangerment of his own life. She imagines him crippled and bloody, pale and weakened. She imagines him tired.

Tommy finishes the drink and places his crystal glass down on the desk, swift and careless and finite.

Yes, Ada thinks she’d prefer Tommy Shelby wounded. It would be one way to keep him in place.)  
  


When Ada came back from Boston she was shocked at how things stay the same. The houses, the weapons, and the battles are all more extravagant, but there’s the same strength in her brothers, the same exhaustion, the same grief, the same wild joy. The same rampant masculine energy and the same craving for femininity, in a world where it’s always slipping through their roughened fingers.

(She’s been here ages now. Can’t manage to leave. He refilled his glass and offered her the same, though the work and any pretext of her official business in his room are done with.

She sits on the fine leather furniture and keeps her thoughts bridled on her tongue, caught behind her painted lips, as she surveys her brother as he is at the end of a long day.

Which days aren’t long, for Tommy Shelby? When it all bleeds together from sunset to sunrise to dusk and midnight back again to dawn, does he ever manage to feel anything at the passing of time before him?

Tommy meets her eyes across his shadowed office. The gleam of whiskey in his glass is echoed in the light of his eyes, his piercing gaze that seems to look straight through her whole being.

He raises the glass to his lips, and she has a flash, a sense-memory of her wedding night, of Freddie’s mouth bruising into hers.

She takes a swig, spilling a little of the fine drink.

Careful there, he mutters, barely audible. None of that swill we used to drink, this stuff is-

I know, she snaps, wiping her mouth roughly with the back of her hand. Tommy Shelby doesn’t accept less than best.

That’s right, he agrees, the curve of his lashes angelic against his sharp features. That’s right, Ada.

Tommy is like a marble sculpture. Like if bloody Michelangelo carved flesh out of stone and then back again. Cruel, perfectly formed, cold and implacable.

Ada longs to break him.)

She watches Tommy making himself better, becoming an enemy of himself to push himself to higher heights and more desperate deeds. And always beneath the surface is the fierceness he feels for his family, his pack, his Clan, his blood. His devotion to no one and nothing but that. At the same time, there’s his capability to betray his family when he can convince himself its for their own good. Because really it’s for his own good - after all, he sees his family as extensions of himself.

(We’re all just different versions of you, aren’t we, Tom? she asks. Possibilities. Of what you could have been.

If I was you, he says, cool as anything, I’d’ve made up my mind by now of who to be.

She bristles. If you were me I’d be dead in a ditch somewhere.

His face doesn’t change, but she thinks he twitches a bit around the eyes. Well we wouldn’t want that, would we, he murmurs.)

Ada watches her brother soak himself in power, ambition, and pride. Later in gin, too, although that’s just a colourful detail. Tommy is like a shark. If he stops moving he’s dead in the water. So he pushes forward, drowning his demons in prostitution and politics, in bullets and bootlegging and blood.

(Ada finds the burn of a cigarette usually does a decent enough job of replacing the ache of loneliness in her chest - so she stands, swaying slightly as she crosses to Tommy’s desk drawer and rummages for his stash. Her hands tremble as she lights one up, and she doesn’t like it - she has a life which requires a solid grip. But she can’t think, can’t breathe around the weight of Tommy’s heady gaze. Her hands are desperate for...

Ada _wants_.

All at once, Tommy steps close behind her. When she turns, his solid form has eclipsed the light from his lamp and Ada can’t see him, only his outline, the rest cast in shadow.

Tom, she whispers, letting the lighter and cigarette clatter to the desk. Her lip trembles. For God’s sake, Tommy, why am I still here?)

Tommy is disappointed in the world, she knows. He’s lost his faith in every sense of the word, he crawled out of France’s muddy catacombs and any brittle beliefs he might’ve once held were stolen and shattered and replaced with nothing, nothing but self-reliance and razor-blades sewn into the flat of a cap.

But then he sometimes fails to meet his own lofty expectations, and that’s crippling, because in the interim Tommy became the only thing he himself had faith in. He became his own deity.

(Our Ada, he sighs, almost reverentially. She can smell the honey golden glow of whiskey on his breath. Sharp as a thorn, eh? Ada Thorne. Sharp. That’s how our Ada loves, inn’it?

She is too close and too far away at once, and Tommy is out of focus before her. She feels as though she’s falling into him, forever.

You’re my sister, Ada, he murmurs. And you’ll be my sister long after I am dead.)

Sometimes there’s a street fight. There’s always a fight, and each one is no more special than any other.

Ada finds herself facedown in the road, a shocking amount of gravel scraped across her cheek. There’s a ringing in her ears, and faintly the hot tang like liquid gunmetal on her tongue that she recognizes as blood.

She watches, transfixed, as Tommy swings a punch in brutal, graceful arc. Again, there’s that flash of hands on her hips, of fingers gripping her hair, of someone else’s breath in her mouth. The opponent falls. Tommy shakes out his hand as he kicks him into the dirt and Ada feels the blunt edges of her nails biting into her palms, sharp enough to draw blood.

Move, he barks, and Ada’s feet betray her.

(What? he asks carelessly, chest heaving, inches from hers.

Jesse Eden, she whispers harshly, as Tommy’s eyes turn flint-hard and dangerous, Greta Jurossi, May Carleton, that crazy Russian cow, damn near every prostitute north of London, Lizzie _fucking_ Stark, and— she takes a deep, shuddering breath. Your bloody _wife_ —

Tommy raises a hand so fast his limb blurs before her, but she doesn’t flinch as he grabs roughly at her chin, stopping her mouth.

Don’t say her name, he growls, fingers clenching her jaw. Don’t you fucking say her name, he spits into her face. Or I’ll— he chokes off and she shoves him back, slapping his face so hard he whirls away from her.

Can’t hit a girl, Tommy? she snarls, stalking after him jerkily, jaw pulsing with pain as he pounds his fist against the wall of his office, rattling the door hinges.

But she knows thats not it. She’s never really been a girl, to him. She’s just Ada.

His Ada. That kind of distinction comes at a price.)

In the weeks after Christmas, after everything, Ada goes to a party.

It’s a pool party - her hairdresser knows someone who is the boyfriend of someone whose indoor swimming hall is decadent and currently full of a six-piece band and more booze than Ada has seen outside of a New York bootlegger’s back room. The scene is positively Bachanalian and she luxuriates in the anonymity of it all. She flirts and dips her painted toes in the pool, swings her hips to the music and lets her swimming robe fall off her shoulders, eventually to the ground. The hot press of strange, beautiful bodies is tempered by the cool air wafting off the blue pool.

She’s just spilled gin down her front and is laughing a bit hysterically with a gaggle of girls who are all wearing flowered wreath necklaces and volunteering to pat her dry. She tries to calm her giggles by taking another smaller sip of her drink, when she spots a tall figure striding into the halo of the doorway.

Tommy’s skin is pale and waxy in the glow of the pool lights. He looks quite out of a place. He’s sepulchral - it’s as though a fresh cadaver has stepped into the swimming hall. The gulf between where she stands and where he looms on the precipice of the room is vast, but it might as well be an inch for how strongly his presence wraps around her senses. He stands stiff near the entrance, jerking his chin in a command, a bid for her to come to him.

She turns away, back to the boy still holding a lighter for her waiting cigarette. He’s drunk - he has to flick it several times to get the flame to bloom.

But she knows Tommy won’t be deterred so easily. She feels him approach, feels the room react to him, feels the heat of his anger roll off his body as he draws near.

Ada, he says, that’s enough.

She parts her lips and blows a lazy stream of smoke, carefully, deliberately. What, you wanted to do the honours? she asks innocently, offering him the tip of her cigarette.

Several people chuckle nervously. Tommy’s jaw tightens - imperceptibly, if Ada did not know him so well.

Now, he orders, his calm exterior betraying nothing of the vexation she knows he is feeling beneath the surface of his ghostly skin.

I’ll go when I’m good and ready, she says coldly, smoothing her free hand over the line of her red bathing costume. I haven’t even swum yet - stay awhile yourself, Tom. She maintains his gaze, daring him to object.

His face looms close to hers, and his voice gets very low. This isn’t the proper crowd for us right now, Ada-

She scoffs. What, because the Shelbys are all of a sudden on the side of the fucking angels, according to the newspapers you pay to write such trash-

It’s indecent, he growls, hand flashing up to encircle her upper arm like she’s a doll.

Fuck off, Tom, she spits, wrestling futilely in his grip. As if you’d be arsed to care it if weren’t for the election-

D’you want people talking, saying filthy things about you, is that it? Filthy things about our family, about your son-?

Don’t you dare, she hisses, twisting so her skin burns under his hand, don’t you bring him into this, like you care about him-

They’re making a scene. The band is loud enough to cover Tommy’s frustrated orders but everyone in the room takes notice when a Shelby enters it. And Tommy looks so very strange in his suit and shiny shoes amidst the half-naked crowd of bathers and dancers.

The Shelbys are no whores, he says very coolly, and she has to laugh. It’s sudden and startling in her throat, jarring in the echoey hall.

Look in a damn mirror, Tommy, she sneers, a hot burst of pleasure blooming in her chest as she sees the hate flash across his face.

Ada wrenches her arm from his grip. She turns, and, taking several running strides, leaps into the pool. The cool water engulfs her and she finds momentary oblivion.

(It’s a violent act, she explains, icy clean. There’s attraction, but also disgust, and hate, so you want to do something to them, something loathsome and dirty, to make them feel all the shame and lust and disdain and envy you feel— so you fuck them. It’s something you do to them—

Then Tommy’s nose nudges behind her ear, and she feels his breath against the column of her throat.

You don’t love any of them, she whispers, longing consuming her being, filling up her soul. She wants to hurt him, to heal him, to save him and damn him. You don’t love us, she continues. I don’t know if you can.

Ada, he rumbles. Ada, I love-

She cuts him off desperately. No, she says, and suddenly, violently, she is crying, so afraid of what he might say. No, she sobs, pounding pathetically on the remorseless plane of his hard chest, her knees crumpling. No, no, no, don’t, you can’t, Tom-

Ada, he breathes, looking young and open and vulnerable like he never lets himself seem. I can do anything.

He waits for her to stop, to slow her movements and rest, panting, in his arms. She closes her eyes. I see you, Tommy, she says, and she knows that’s why she’s still here. I see you, she whispers again.

She sleeps in his office, curled with him on the fine, fine furniture, their tangled limbs an echo of childhood innocence, something primitive and sacred.

What a mockery, Ada thinks, as she gathers her shoes in the weak light of dawn, her brother’s face blank in the throes of sleep. What a fucking mockery of love.

Ada walks out through the main doors of Shelby Company, Ltd.

There’s no winning this life, Tom, she thinks.)

Tommy Shelby is a victor, a consummate survivor. He will go on.

Ada will keep watch.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought.


End file.
